Seaguy

Publication history

Morrison has expressed on various occasions that Seaguy represents a deliberate effort to move away from conventions of the current era of comics, "I had the idea to develop Seaguy into a weapon I could use to fight back against the trendy and unconvincing 'bad-ass' cynicism of current comics, most of which are produced by the most un-'bad-ass' men you can possibly imagine". Morrison believes that in this fashion the work represents a new vanguard in the development of comics. He expressed similar sentiments about Zenith, one of the earliest series he worked on, when he said that it "was a reaction against torment superheroes."

Seaguy was planned as a trilogy, the second and third volumes were to be entitled "The Slaves of Mickey Eye" and "Seaguy Eternal" respectively, but due to the lower-than-expected sales of the comic, it was thought that the sequels were unlikely to be published. In 2006, a fan reported to a comics rumor column that Morrison was holding DC Comics' 52 weekly limited series for ransom. He reportedly offered to help write the series as long as they allowed him to go forward on the Seaguy sequel.

In April 2008 Morrison stated that both sequels would go ahead and gave an overview of the ideas he has about the different parts:

The first sequel, Seaguy: The Slaves of Mickey Eye, was released on April 1, 2009 by DC Comics/Vertigo.

Morrison has expanded on the broader themes:

by the time we get into the third book, it’s quite a serious superhero story. This is my Watchmen, really. This is where I’m really getting to talk about the idea of the superhero.

It’s kind of a conspiracy story. It’s something like The Prisoner. We’re starting to see more and more about what actually happens. This series is a transition from the world we're living in today into the world of Seaguy, which is taking place maybe 50 or 70 years in the future. So believe it or not, it's actually quite realistic in the end in the sense that it’s going to explore how the world got that way and why it got that way and the real piece of shit that's behind it all. It’s a big superhero book. The thing that it’s closest to of my previous work is All-Star Superman.

Plot

Seaguy is a super-hero who has never really had an adventure and spends his days in New Venice playing chess with Death, watching Mickey Eye (a cartoon show about an all-seeing, all-knowing, psychopathic eye, and an obvious spoof on Mickey Mouse) and going to the Mickey Eye amusement park. He constantly expresses his wish to go on adventures and impress a beautiful bearded warrior woman named She-Beard, but he never seems to get around to it because he's told the world doesn't need heroes anymore. However, when Seaguy and Chubby discover that a new food staple called Xoo is sentient, they decide to protect it from evil forces and bring it home.

Seaguy exists in a seemingly perfect world in which all the super-heroes no longer save lives or do much of anything except ride the rides at the Mickey Eye amusement park. It is public knowledge that all the evil in the world was finally destroyed after a powerful entity called the Anti-Dad was destroyed by all the super-heroes, effectively leaving the heroes without jobs. The style of the book is equal parts dark tragedy and light-hearted whimsy as the main character travels from one adventure to the other, but with each adventure becoming more tragic than the one before it, until Seaguy discovers the secret history of the moon.

Collected editions

The first volume has been collected into a trade paperback: